Escape Into Architecture

GAUTAM BHATIA 3
Features

If imagined spaces cannot be built on land, let them

inhabit a place in the sky.

t the lobby of the jahanuma Palace in Bhopalnow a hotelis a formal portrait of

Bhopals begums. Fully clothed in burqas, they are seated in tiers, as in any formal group
photograph. The photo caption below reveals the names, Seated from left to right: Begum
Jahanara, Begum Noor, Begum and so on.
For a long while I stood back and pondered the riddle of the photograph. Was this a form of royal
social record, even though no identifiable body part was visible? Or was it some sort of satire?
The photographs essential criteria to reveal were stymied by the Islamic draperys criteria to
conceal. It was like someone assessing car designs by comparing chassis numbers. I didnt
know whether to laugh or cry. Perhaps the photographer had even asked the begums to smile
behind their veils.

Public Baths: A string of tubs in a desert the irony of Indian architectural juxtaposition

Architecture, too, has learnt to distance itself from the observer. To live behind the veil. Like the
invisible begums, for so long, my own understanding of buildings was similarly limited to the
faade. Limited, in fact, to that first sighting of deception behind which lay a more pugnacious
reality.
When it comes to houses, or for that matter any form of building, people become grand in their
ambitions. Buying a fridge or pair of shoes does not impart visibility or identity to the user,
architecture does. People swear and sweep across the spectrum of possibilities and become like
spoilt, demanding children. A staircase remembered from a European trip, a bathroom recalled
from a Japanese hotel, an outdoor Jacuzzi from Indonesia. I want it, I must have it; the cesspool
of architecture clouds the eyes and makes the impossible possible.

Cabinet Apartments: So precious, they are enclosed and protected inside a cabinet

I once knew someone who treated architecture like a great heroic adventure, much like a
gruelling and hazardous climb up Mount Everest. Design would begin casually. But as ideas
poured in, he would become reckless and bold.
Id like a heated lap pool outside the bedroom, hed propose.
His instruction would cause a minor blizzard at base camp. Id warn, But your bedroom is on the
third floor.
So!
After a while, hed venture again up another untested slope, Do you think we could have a drivein drawing room?
This from the man who has to have the latest BMW shipped directly from Germany.
But why? Id ask foolishly. Do you want to park the car behind the sofa?
No response. He would have already moved on to thoughts of helipads and roof-top saunas.
I realised then that the new house was merely a stage-set of expensive products assembled like
a personalised showroom.
Finally, in keeping with the drift I would suggest, Have you considered a bathroom inside the lift,
that way you are always on
the move?
If he could be silly, I could be stupid.
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and turns and spits and
extends and is blunt and coarse and sweet and stupid as life itself.

Tree House: A log hut inside a log, redrawing the world in mechanical simplicity

I often remember the Oldenburg line, only as a continual reminder of the necessity of stupid in
architecture. Clever had been the desired apprehension in buildings that had long pretended to
be more than what they were. But without the bittersweet experience of risk and pleasure,
architecture fell lamely into a professional trap. The monochromatic practice of building with a
straight face and following the stifling rules of cultural obligation, social status, and the physics of
gravity, left every new design a mere mock drill in industrial assembly, tinged with the architects
personal aesthetic armoury, a defeated deflated spirit.
Architecture, to me, had become the most scathing indictment of failure, my failure. So I began to
move away from the proper and the just, and all the singular entanglements of professional life. I
knew if I thought too long about all the things precious to me, there was always the fear that little
by little, they would invade my mind and make it infertile. Architectures memory is the hardest to
ignore; it is reinforced day and night, in the mind, in the neighbourhood, in the city.

Racquet Club: A tennis club in the shape of a racquet, drawing that which will never be built

I have caught myself on occasion with a deliberately destructive and perverse urge towards my
own work. I want to make privacy public and take public actions into the innermost sanctum: a
bank vault made in glass, exposing money and gold to the street, a man urinating in public
knowing full well that he cant be seen outside, a woman bathing without a wall surrounding her
but in complete privacy. Then blur the definitions of inside and out: make a road that runs inside
a building, a building that sits on top of a road. Even reverse the conventions of movement and
repose: build a home as a bridge between the two banks of a river, make a living room in a
moving elevator. Or confuse the relationship with the Up and Down: a basement with a glass
floor viewing the mud ground beneath, a sky experienced in a basement, an attic without a roof.
How about furniture hung on walls or attached to the ceiling, paintings on the floor, a mall with no
glass, a hotel without corridors, a bookshop that is also a diner, a restaurant in a moving bus.
The dual nature of such buildings is a myopic, almost obsessive claim.
In my neighbourhood, I see a woman buying fresh flowers for her puja room every day. The
florist display is against the local markets public urinal. Strangely, the urinals stench and
proximity dont seem to diminish the sanctity of the fresh flowers and their intended place in a
religious setting. Choosing to be blind to all that you dont want to see makes life tolerable.

WC Villa: A villa as a water closet, making private spaces public

However hard Ive tried, I am unable to cultivate that blindness. Every time I move out of the
house, onto the street, it is with fear and trepidation. Something of what we build, the way it
relates to its surroundings, the way it eventually falls apart, grates on visual memory. If there is a
professed spatial, humanist or artistic spirit to architecture, it is impossible to see it in the daily
encounters with the city. Flagging in spirit, unsightly, blemished and depressing, the clutter of
shops and houses and offices and malls are like wounds on the skin of the earth, spreading like
parasites, smudging skylines, and slowly sucking out the visual pleasures of ordinary life. The
city is a wasted place, and the architecture that rises within it only contributes a daily dose of
hostility and conflict in an already chaotic environment. Even when buildings are made with
grandiose intentions, collectively they become a jumble, inseparable from each otherlike
garlands of marigolds piled on a dead body.

Escalator: Confusing the relationship with the Up and Down, the dual nature of architecture

When that happens, there is little to do but retreat. I want to move away from the clutter and
chaos, to the quiet promise of the drawing board. With pencil in hand, there is a desperate wish
to break free, to build in imaginary space, unconnected to the ground by gravity, to make an
earth yet uninhabited, where architecture is an idealised presence. I need to draw that which I
will never build. A house in an apple, an office floating in the clouds, a hotel made of suitcases, a
car wash as a tub. Apartment houses so precious, they are enclosed and protected inside a
cabinet. For a while such drawings help me escape into childhood and I begin to redraw the
world in mechanical simplicity: a tennis club in the shape of a racquet, a villa as a WC, public
baths as a string of tubs, a log hut inside a log.

Car Wash: Three cars in a tub, making public spaces private

But not for long. Sometimes, architectures most persistent refrain does not just demand a
rebellion against convention, but a complete physical reversal of convention itself. The absence

of water in the desert concludes with a silver faucet that drenches revellers suspended in a well.
The absence of groundwater in an ancient water tank is substituted with a mineral water bottle.
Partly, such drawings are done to state the persistent irony of Indian architectural juxtapositions,
the phenomenon of puja room flowers against the urinal wall.
My own break away is not diminishing the importance of architecture, but an enlargement of its
possibilities for me. It is hard to expect that ideas will assume a personality of their own, that a
minor significance in drawing will raise its voice loud enough to be heard. It is only a hope, an
architectural missile aimed at a dark threatening sky. Where it will land, if ever, is another matter.

Excavation: A complete reversal of convention itself